P: Multiple and reorder/sort effects/styles

As far as compatibility goes, maybe they could save the file in a backward compatible way... until someone reorders the layer effects or duplicates a layer effect. Then save it the new way, and require the latest version of Photoshop to edit it. Kind of like the updates now, if someone uses a Photoshop feature from the latest release, you can't edit it unless you have the latest version.

I know you guys can tackle this!

And once you have the new system in place, you can start introducing more interesting layer styles, and allowing people do things like dotted lines, and transparency/masking effects, or whatever else.

Flash deals with small, screen resolution documents.
When you try using those Flash features on large (digital camera, or print size) documents, the performance is too horrible to think about.

It's interesting that Adobe Flash actually has exactly this functionality, and when I use Flash to create graphics, I have used the ability to reorder layer styles, and add multiple instances of the same type of layer style, to great effect!

As others have said, it would be very useful to specify whether a dropshadow starts at the object, or at the stroke around the object. Or if a gradient overlay effects just the object, or also effects the glow around the object.

Why is this considered difficult for Photoshop now, when Flash 8 launched their ability to do object filtering in 2005 with the ability to reorder and duplicate the equivalent of layer styles? You'd think this would come up in feature requests in the 9 years since Flash did it, or at least the 3 years that PS users have been asking for it in just this thread!

Granted, Flash's filters panel isn't perfect and limited in other ways, but can't we have the best of both worlds?

When creating an icon and sometimes even UI, I need multiple instances of the same effect.

A drop shadow for example - in order to achieve a more realistic shadow and depth, I need to add 2 drop shadows - one tighter and another one wider.

With gradients I sometimes combine a vertical and horizontal gradients to achieve volume and lighting.

With stokes, in some styles of logo / type you want to have multiple strokes.

I’ve needed duplicate instances of almost every effect and it would be great if Photoshop allowed this.

How will it affect opening older files? Nothing changes from older files. They just won't be able to open files created with latest version of PS, in older versions of PS - but that's already the case with several features and not a deciding factor for them.

I understand that this might cause some problems with the compatibility of the older files etc. So Adobe cannot "just do it". They had to make plans.

Maybe this feature would be one that could be disabled and activated in the blending options. So if you wanna open your file with your old ps, you should use the old blending options for that. And if you don't need to open it ever in old ps, then you can activate the new features. Okay, now when i start thinking, this could also increase .PSD file sizes a bit and the whole .psd file needs to be changed. And what happens when you open it in After Effects etc?

I'd really like to see this happen as well. Hopefully you guys will figure out a way to do this at some point in the future.

As Jeff already noted: there is no way to do this while maintaining perfect backward compatibility, and it is far from a simple code change. This request really is not as simple as it sounds from the user's side of things.

@Chris Cox, @J453

It's encouraging that you guys have noticed our little thread and took the time to respond. Thanks!

I was wondering if you have any thoughts on my previous suggestion for how to do this in a way that is both backward compatible and with relatively simple code changes? The TLDR: Just have the software do what the community is already doing: duplicate the layer in order to stack up the effects in the desired order; BUT present those duplicated layers to the user as if they are just one original layer. The file structure remains unchanged, the layer effect code remains unchanged; only the UI is different.

This is really a no-brainer. This functionality should have been there from the start. Using 3rd party software and workarounds is a joke for a $700 program. I've ben waiting since Photoshop 7 for this.

Oh and +1 to it being a major P I T A ordeal to log on and post this reply!